Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s hybrid biopic and offbeat documentary on Pavement, will premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The festival runs from August 28 to September 7, though an exact premiere date has not yet been announced; Pavements will play in the Orrizonti (Horizons) competition section. As well as the band members, stars include Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Zoe Lister-Jones, Michael Esper, Nat Wolff, Fred Hechinger, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, and Kathryn Gallagher. The film, according to the announcement, is “a prismatic, narrative, scripted, documentary, musical, metatextual hybrid,” partly documenting their 2022 reunion tour.
First anounced in a 2022 New Yorker story, Pavements spawned the Pavement musical staged in New York that year, footage from which features in the movie. The film is based on an obscure directive from Stephen Malkmus, who, per The New Yorker’s Hannah Seidlitz, “said he wasn’t interested in hiring a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to hire a screenwriter. But he didn’t want a screenplay.” Today’s announcement notes that the film tracks “the preparations for a musical based on their songs, a museum devoted to their history, and a big-budget Hollywood biopic inspired by their saga as the most important band of a generation.”
Alex Ross Perry previously worked on Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes” video, as well as a genre-spanning array of indie movies. (Many, such as his last feature, 2018’s Her Smell, star Elisabeth Moss.) Perry told The New Yorker he wanted to write something “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical,” and added, “You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [Renaldo and Clara], and put them all in a blender.”